“This is how the world ends- not with a whimper, but with a bang…”

Emphasis on BANG! Holy crap, my friends, I am wrecked. The volume on my brain has been cranked to 11, my guts are screaming like Cobains', and my heart is pounding like Kanye West on crack. I’m not sure what I’ve just seen, but, by the beard of Zues!, I want to see it again. I love it, I hate it, I want to kill it, I want to marry it.

Richard Kelly is a straight up P-I-M-P pimp.

And, his new fever-dream flick, “Southland Tales,” is the craziest, messiest, most amazing and ridiculous thing to screen in theatres this year - trust me on this.

Where to see it?: Laemmle’s Monica 4-plex, cool theatre, half the film takes place on the Santa Monica pier and beach just behind this smart, hip art-house
(www.laemmle.com/viewtheatre.php?thid=3)

Who is Richard Kelly?: Writer-Director of the 2001 cult hit “Donnie Darko”

Who is in it?: (don’t laugh) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean William Scott, Justin Timberlake, Miranda Richardson, John Lovitz, Nora Dunn, Amy Pohler, Cheri Oteri, Bai Ling, and Mandy Moore (to name just a few)

What’s it about?: The end of the world. Neo-Marxism. Porn. TV. Politics. Screenplays. Doppelgangers. Iraq. Oil. Revelations. Texas. Time travel. Fascism. Music videos. Renewable energy. Jesus. Venice Beach. LOS ANGELES.

I capitalize Los Angeles because this film, no matter how strange and insane, is, first and foremost, a bizarre and beautiful love letter to the City of Angels and the California way. Sprawling, convoluted, off-kilter, frustrating, and mesmerizing – like the city itself – Kelly’s “Tales” blasts its way onto the Mount Rushmore of modern, LA-centric classics, positioning itself somewhere below “Magnolia,” “Short Cuts,” and “Mulholland Drive” (how far down the rock you want to place it depends on your ability to suspend disbelief and roll with a geeked up auteur drunk on ideas and sensory overload).

Not that there aren’t problems with Kelly’s doom-ridden pop apocalypse. Because there are – quite a few, actually (or, “quite a lot,” according to numerous critics). The “plot,” for one, is a big, byzantine cluster of obsessions and tangents, loosely held together by a nuclear bombing in Texas, an upcoming presidential election, a screenplay called “The Power,” and – like “Darko” – a rift in the space time continuum [and, believe me, I’m leaving out so (so) much]. It contains too many genres, too many subplots, too many characters, just, too…much…stuff. Blah, blah, blah…

I say, who cares? Kelly offers us a ticket to ride and we should take it. The sheer balls and visual skill – the hunger – at which he attacks our modern world, our Los Angeles, is breathtaking. The plethora of storylines and mood swings are there because LA and America and the world in 2008 is a crazy, freaking place (am I wrong here?). He gets so much right (dude is plugged into the zeitgeist), and has so much fun doing it, I’ll give him a pass for the majority of his overreaching-his-grasp moments.

Three scenes that I can’t get out of my head:

1) A scarred and buffed-out Justin Timberlake downing Budweisers and lip-synching to The Killer’s “All These Things I’ve Done” (he plays a hopped-up Fallujah survivor and serves as the film’s narrator)…

2) Sean William Scott (in a break out performance playing two versions of a mysterious cop) soaring through the dark sky in a flying ice-cream truck…

3) The Rock dancing a Lynchian ménage-a-trios with Buffy and Mandy Moore in a “Titanic”-like zeppelin, hovering above a dazzling downtown LA as fireworks glitter in the 4th of July night…

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. You need to discover the rest on your own…

by Matthew Sidney Long